Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [8]
The alternative is to flail away madly with a splitting maul, sweating like an overheated stevedore and likely working up a stellar case of carpal tunnel. My wife is right. My pecking away solo is silly, and my left arm has been numb for a month in a dermatome representing the ulnar nerve. But I’m not out here to be efficient. I’m out here to clear my head. To feel the ax rise and fall, to blow the breath out on the downstroke and drive through the bolt. To bring the blade down dead center and see the wood explode—the satisfaction is, I suppose, similar to what a golfer feels when connecting with the sweet spot. When you hit the wood just right, it doesn’t feel like you’ve dealt a blow, but rather that the steel head has floated through the wood. When you miss, on the other hand—when you deliver a stroke that ends in a dead wedge, or kicks out sideways and caroms into the dirt—you’re often left feeling disoriented, sometimes with the same numb-palm sensation as when you swing early and hit a baseball off the tip of the bat.
I want to split wood by hand for the same reason I want to have pigs and chickens. You want to eat meat, you raise an animal and kill it, or at the very least steal its eggs. You want to stay warm, you knock the wood into little chunks. Beyond that, there is the idea that primitive, meaningful work delights the mind. When undertaken in the absence of compulsion, I should say. One regularly finds that praises of an honest day’s work are frequently sung by people in clean clothes. I am thinking more along the lines of the character created by Jim Harrison in the novel Returning to Earth, who says his blue-collar jobs “kept me grounded in actual life.” I am being selfish about the wood. Proprietary, even. When I chonk a chunk into the firebox, I want to stand back and claim it a bit. A man, being a man. Providing.
You take that ax in hand, and it frees your mind. Of course, too much dreaming and it will also free your toes. I am regularly dramatic with my wife about accumulated pending deadlines and backlogs and time spent on the road, only to have her look out the window and see me there chopping when I should be typing. In proposing the firewood bee, she is being eminently sensible, and that is where we part company.
If she brings it up again, I shall tell her I am freeing my mind.
The centerpiece of my parent’s farmhouse is a stout Monarch Model 3755D wood-burning range. Carl Carlson, the man who homesteaded our farm, bought it as a wedding gift for his wife Charlotte when they were married in 1920. When he vetted the stove prior to purchase at the Farmers Store in New Auburn, the salesman demonstrated its durability by jumping up and down on the open oven door. Product testing of equivalent rigor is unimaginable in our stamped-tin age and will furthermore get you Tasered at the Best Buy. Behold the mighty nation gone slack.
When the Carlsons installed an electric range, the Monarch was banished to the basement. Mr. Carlson reattached the stovepipe to the chimney, and Mrs. Carlson used the stove to burn garbage and make lye soap. By the time my parents arrived, it was coated with rust and dinge. Looking as ever for ways to pinch pennies, Mom and Dad decided to move the stove back upstairs and use it to supplement the furnace heat. In order to do so, Dad had to disassemble it—unbolting the warming ovens, detaching the water jackets, and generally breaking it down into the smallest components possible. It was still a prodigious project; I have seen the original catalog materials for the 3755D, and it weighs 442 pounds—that’s a lotta microwaves.
A neighbor came to help with the lifting, and once the stove